Marie Curie became the first woman Nobel laureate when she, her husband and a colleague were jointly awarded the prize for physics in 1903 for their work on radioactivity.
A few years later she won the Nobel prize for chemistry too, for her discovery of two elements, polonium (named after her native Poland) and radium, and for her work in isolating radium and studying its chemical properties. The unit of measurement of radioactivity, curie, is named after her.